Free Practice Questions for Cisco 200-201 Exam

 Cyber attribution is the process of identifying the source, motive, and methods of a cyberattack. Cyber attribution can help investigators to determine the responsibility, intent, and capability of the threat actors, as well as to prevent, deter, or respond to future attacks. One of the pieces of information that is needed for cyber attribution is known threat actor behavior, which refers to the patterns, techniques, tools, and tactics that are characteristic of a specific threat actor or group. Known threat actor behavior canhelp investigators to narrow down the suspects, link different incidents, and understand the objectives and strategies of the attackers. References := Understanding Cisco Cybersecurity Operations Fundamentals (CBROPS) v1.0, Module 5: Security Policies and Procedures, Lesson 5.2: Incident Response, Topic 5.2.3: Cyber Attribution, page 5-14.

Indicators of Attack (IoA) refer to observable behaviors or artifacts that suggest a security breach or ongoing attack.

When internal hosts communicate with countries outside the business range, it may indicate data exfiltration or command-and-control communication to an external threat actor.

Unlike Indicators of Compromise (IoC) which indicate that a system has already been compromised, IoAs are often used to identify malicious activity in its early stages.

Monitoring for unusual outbound connections is a crucial aspect of detecting advanced persistent threats (APTs) and other sophisticated attacks.

References

Difference Between Indicators of Compromise and Indicators of Attack

Cyber Threat Detection Using Indicators of Attack

Network Monitoring for Anomalous Behavior

The #netstat -an command output typically displays a list of all open ports and associated connections. If the web application is slowed down, the engineer would look for unusual patterns such as an excessive number of connections to the web server which could indicate a denial-of-service attack. However, without specific details from the #netstat -an output, it’s not possible to determine the exact cause of the issue. Therefore, the engineer would need to gather more data, possibly including checking server logs, resource usage, and network traffic patterns to diagnose the problem accurately.

Understanding Cisco Cybersecurity Operations Fundamentals (CBROPS) provides knowledge on network monitoring tools and interpreting their output to identify potential security incidents.

Agent-based monitoring: With agent-based monitoring, software agents are installed on the monitored systems or devices. These agents collect data locally, perform filtering or preprocessing of the data, and then transmit the relevant or valuable information to the monitoring system. Agent-based monitoring allows for local processing and filtering, which can reduce network utilization by only transmitting essential data. Agentless monitoring: Agentless monitoring, on the other hand, does not require software agents to be installed on the monitored systems or devices. Instead, it relies on leveraging existing protocols and interfaces, such as APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) or SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), to remotely access and retrieve monitoring data from the target systems. Agentless monitoring generally involves higher network utilization as the monitoring system needs to gather data from remote systems over the network.

A buffer overflow attack occurs when more data is written to a buffer than it is designed to hold. This excess data can overwrite adjacent memory locations, leading to the execution of malicious code or crashing the system. Buffer overflows are a common vulnerability that attackers exploit to gain unauthorized access to systems.

Understanding Cisco Cybersecurity Operations Fundamentals (CBROPS)

Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts the victim’s data and demands a ransom for the decryption key. The attacker may also threaten to publish or delete the data if the ransom is not paid. In this case, the Egregor malware is distributed through a Cobalt Strike, which is a penetration testing tool that can be used to deploy payloads on compromised systems. The malware exfiltrates the victim’s data to a command and control server and uses it as leverage to extort money from the victim. References := Cisco Cybersecurity Operations Fundamentals, Module 1: Security Concepts, Lesson 1.3: Common Network Application Operations and Attacks, Topic 1.3.3: Malware Attacks

Wireshark is a widely-used network protocol analyzer that allows users to capture and interactively browse the traffic running on a computer network. It provides full packet capture capabilities, enabling detailed analysis of network traffic. References: This is supported by the CBROPS course materials, which discuss security monitoring and the analysis of network traffic, including full packet capture tools like Wireshark